AFS Welcomes New Team Members

AFS welcomes Charish Bishop, M.A., as Community Engagement Coordinator and Chunfen Zhou, M.A., as the new AFS graduate assistant.

We welcome Charish Bishop to the team as the AFS Community Engagement Coordinator. Charish has a long history in community outreach, event planning, and volunteer engagement. A Diplomat with the Foreign Service, she has lived abroad in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America working closely with various non profits, artistic communities, schools, and cultural institutions – including the Community Liaison Office for the Foreign Service (2010-2020), spearheading and leading cultural exhibitions and charitable projects for expat families abroad where her work was awarded by Ambassador Robert Godec of Kenya. 

Charish also draws on her former experience as the Folklife Specialist for NCTA’s National Folk Festival in Salisbury, MD (2022), the Volunteer Assistant and Volunteer Coordinator for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival (2023-2024), as well as her Master’s in Folklore from George Mason University. Now, she will bring her talents to AFS to serve part-time as the Membership Engagement Coordinator, with chief responsibility for membership communications, section and prize/award management, public outreach, and volunteer engagement for the annual meeting. You can now direct inquiries regarding membership accounts, billing, AFS sections, prizes and awards, educational institutions, and volunteering with AFS to membership@afsnet.org.

Chunfen Zhou joins the AFS staff in the role of graduate assistant. Zhou is currently enrolled in the doctoral program of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington with a focus on material culture. Prior to coming to Indiana, he obtained his MS in anthropology from the University of Utah and MA in museum studies from New York University. He has also worked for two years as an anthropology intern at the Milwaukee Public Museum, where he was involved in a variety of administration-, collection-, and exhibition-related activities. He is eager to bring his work experience in cultural institutions to AFS, where he will assist with various projects in both digital and physical spaces. He can be reached at afsga@afsnet.org.